by Jon Peddie
The number of processors, both x86 and GPU, available for rendering has been increasing exponentially. Rendering is one of the applications that can soak up all the cycles that are available to it, which is an example of Peddie’s first law – In computer graphics, too much is not enough.

Peddie’s research group looked at the installed base of x86 CPUs and GPUs and calculated the total number of instruction cycles available on each architecture.

Cores alone don’t tell the whole story, the real measure is how millions of operations per second can the processor execute. A general figure of merit is to multiple the processor’s clock by its word size. The GPUs running at one fourth the speed of a CPU, and with just a 32-bit processor compared to the 64-bit CPU still delver the most MIPS because of their overwhelming number of cores.

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